Recent reviews by Klagarn

It is those games and I cleared them

Awesome detective game, the only real complaint would be that it's a bit short, but it's also a strength that it gets that many story twists to happen in that little time and the ending really ties everything together neatly.

It also gets to play with its own seemingly simple format a bit in ways I can't elaborate upon without big spoilers, suffice to say it's connected to the wild story turns.

Obra Dinn still wins in feeling "full detective" where this is eeever so slightly more into logic puzzle territory... but I do like logic puzzles. It's also just because of scale, both a "logic puzzle" and a bigger "investigation" uses process of elimination, and where Obra Dinn has the running task of checking off the entire list of crewmembers, this game is broken into more "discrete" smaller cases that you solve before going to the next.

Great basic concept that could have been better served doing a "slay the spire" thing of just a kickass completable campaign instead of heeavy focus on weird grindy daily stuff and "metagame" in general rather than the one run you're doing at present. And now they're starting to dabble in AI art nonsense that I want no part in

It's exactly what the title says and it rules. Throw on a podcast or music to make your own radio channel and get driving.

Constant freezing upon trying to load a level, and rejoining is non-existent so out you go - which coincidentally also (depending on the type) means quest progress doesn't happen that was actually achieved. For example, if you had "reach round 2 4 times" and you reached round 4 but got hit with the freeze - no progress for you. This is likely not a problem if your PC is strong enough, but is still a very silly issue to have on something that is well above minimum reqs

And then the quests themselves are extremely aggressive in the F2P scheme, making you play JUST a bit more than is actually fun to "casually" do in a game like this - if you want to complete battle passes/events without paying, that is. Combined this gets real frustrating yet is also why my amount of hours is what it is, pretty much

The final -Cells game, little bit bitter sweet almost. Quite different type of puzzle from the other ones, heavily focused on basic arithmetic. In this shortest final game at last some QoA things like volume sliders are added, and the nature of the puzzles eliminates the need for the ever painful star rating system of the previous ones. HexCells is the most popular for a reason, but I think this is kind of a hidden banger, I especially liked the "different target numbers in each direction" concept

What has disappeared is partially complete solutions being saved, but the puzzles are also of a size where that's not suuuper needed (that's also why I call this the shortest, comparable amount of puzzles but nowhere near as stupidly big, which would also get tedious very quickly). However this has inflated my playtime a bit, when I've left the game idle for 30 mins while eating etc...

Picross on steroids, essentially. Not as in that it results in a recognizable image, but it starts with that same puzzle mechanic and starts layering stuff on top.

Like the Hexcells games it gets a bit annoying and "pixelhunty" towards the latter puzzles that are very big, and if I wasn't dipping into this very on and off (and listening to podcasts while doing it) I might have legitimately gone insane. But it does save your half-finished solutions so you can always pause and resume later.

Oh yeah the star system is really frustrating, if you misclick one single time and you want all stars you have to fully start over, same as Hexcells. If you don't care it's fine, for me I gotta GET THOSE ACHIEVEMENTS

The graphics and aesthetic is great, the puzzles are often genuinely clever and there are some satisfying moves you can pull off. I was motivated enough to 100% it (get golds on all the time trials), though more and more out of spite as time went on...

Two things that really grated though:

The physics are janky. As physics tends to be! Sometimes you just get rekt by random stuff happening and you have to reset which is KIND OF not a big problem, if you were just trying to get through the puzzles and beat the game (which you of course can). I don't think this is a good fit with a big focus on built in time trials for "full completion", and even if the game just had "beat the levels" as the goal you would still need to go fast in the levels that are more made for it! (timed buttons and rolling balls you have to "built the track" for). This alone would be far from enough for a thumbs down though.

The big problem is that the game appears to break down when you reset a lot (unless this is just my hard drive dying in which case I'll eat my words). Towards the end of my gold sweep I was having objects not (visually) load in until I reset the game, or objects not getting put back when I reset a puzzle (which would have been in my favour, but a straight up unreproducable glitch isn't even an enjoyable way to cheese a level). Resetting to a checkpoint rolls back the timer which is good for letting you actually beat these gold times, but very strange for leaderboards (could have been an exception that only non-reset playthroughs became leaderboard times) but worst of all is not 100% consistent. Moving objects on cycles or physics objects don't always get set to the same starting point, meaning you can do the exact same moves with different outcomes in terms of time. Meaning more resetting, catch 22 going on here

Really good. Really stupid. Looks incredible, maybe the first time AA has felt like it BENEFITTED from being in 3D

If you like Ace Attorney, Professor Layton and the like check this out. It's not QUITE in that standard, thanks largely to the weird pacing where you're doing a whole lot of picross (especially since that's the only type of puzzle there is). There's also nothing like the AA court cases that "turns the investigation into gameplay", the fact that you're walking around with an inventory of evidence and showing it to people is mostly just a way to make that story "feel interactive". Should you get stuck on what to do you can actually just trial and error your way through

The other criticisms I can think of is that the controls are slightly wonky, and that the music can get repetitive (largely thanks to the picross puzzles that make you stay listening to one track way longer than you'd ever do in AA)

Graphics and story are the strongest points, and one of them you can judge by the screenshots here alone. It's all static images but done in an interesting "cardboard cutout" way